Scott took the idea from gwern, who, in turn, took the idea from muflax.
Muflax’s system is a set of belief tags, “strongly believed”, “partially believed”, and “not believed”, which indicate how strongly he believes in a post. In addition to the belief tags, he has other tags, like “fiction” or “log”, which indicate that a post doesn’t contain any real claims, but is commentary or opinion.
Gwern took muflax’s system and formalized it further by using a variant of Kesselmann’s estimative words, a list of words from National Intelligence Estimates that are used by analysts to indicate how probable they believe a particular event is likely to be. To the list of estimative words, he added “log”, which indicates that a particular piece of writing is intended to document an existing text or event, and is not intended to create predictions.
Scott, in turn, took gwern’s version and turned it into a more freeform text, which, so far as I can tell, he really only uses as a disclaimer on posts that are wildly speculative. Other people in the rationality community took Scott’s version of free-form epistemic status and took it as a license to engage in witticism and signalling.
Of the three implementations above, the implementation described in OP most resembles Muflax’s version—a set of coarse-grained categories that range from “I’m totally sure of this, and it would rock my world to be proven wrong,” to “This is interesting, but I’m not at all sure that it’s actually true.” While I would prefer gwern’s version, with a rigorous set of epistemic words which are standardized across posts, these coarse grained categories are certainly better than the chaos that we have today.
Scott took the idea from gwern, who, in turn, took the idea from muflax.
Muflax’s system is a set of belief tags, “strongly believed”, “partially believed”, and “not believed”, which indicate how strongly he believes in a post. In addition to the belief tags, he has other tags, like “fiction” or “log”, which indicate that a post doesn’t contain any real claims, but is commentary or opinion.
Gwern took muflax’s system and formalized it further by using a variant of Kesselmann’s estimative words, a list of words from National Intelligence Estimates that are used by analysts to indicate how probable they believe a particular event is likely to be. To the list of estimative words, he added “log”, which indicates that a particular piece of writing is intended to document an existing text or event, and is not intended to create predictions.
Scott, in turn, took gwern’s version and turned it into a more freeform text, which, so far as I can tell, he really only uses as a disclaimer on posts that are wildly speculative. Other people in the rationality community took Scott’s version of free-form epistemic status and took it as a license to engage in witticism and signalling.
Of the three implementations above, the implementation described in OP most resembles Muflax’s version—a set of coarse-grained categories that range from “I’m totally sure of this, and it would rock my world to be proven wrong,” to “This is interesting, but I’m not at all sure that it’s actually true.” While I would prefer gwern’s version, with a rigorous set of epistemic words which are standardized across posts, these coarse grained categories are certainly better than the chaos that we have today.